A common process in database administration is to export all tables of a Firebird / InterBase database to flat files – mostly on a regular interval, e.g., daily. EMS Data Export for InterBase/Firebird supports the easy extraction of Firebird / InterBase databases. The tool is part of EMS SQL Management Studio for InterBase/Firebird.
EMS Data Export for InterBase/Firebird is a powerful program to export your data quickly from InterBase/Firebird databases to any of 19 available formats, including MS Access, MS Excel, MS Word (RTF), HTML, XML, PDF, TXT, CSV, DBF, ODF and others. Data Export for InterBase/Firebird includes a wizard, which allows you to set export options for each table visually (destination filename, exported fields, data formats, and much more) and a command line utility to export data from tables and queries in one-touch.

This article guides you trough the process of exporting your InterBase/Firebird database to flat files which can be processed by other systems, for example in data warehouse projects.

Welcome Page

After starting EMS Data Export for InterBase/Firebird, the following dialog welcomes you to the tool:

Select the Next button to continue.

Set InterBase and Firebird Server Connection Options

In the next dialog, you have to select the Firebird / InterBase server and the database file to be exported:

There are three authentication types available, depending on your database configuration:

• Normal (which is the traditional InterBase and Firebird authentication and uses a security database)
• Windows authentication (only supported by Firebird 2.1 and up)
• Mixed mode

In addition, you can define if you want to connect to the database server using a secure shell (SSH) tunnel.

After setting up your server connection, select the Next button to continue.

Select Tables for Data Export

The following dialog allows you to select the tables to be exported. You can select any number of tables, but for the purpose of providing the data to a later data warehouse project, you should select all tables:

Select the output directory for the produced flat files on the bottom of the dialog. Hit Next to continue.

Create Queries for Data Export

In addition to the tables, you can also add custom queries, for example to export system tables or to export normalized tables, which is a common task in data warehousing projects:

After adding your custom queries, select Next to continue.

Specify Output Data Format to Export

This dialog allows you to define the output format for each table (or all together when you select the Apply to all exported objects option):

The following output formats are available:

• Microsoft Access (*.mdb & *.accdb)
• Microsoft Excel (*.xls & *.xlsx)
• Microsoft Word (*.doc & *.docx)
• Rich Text Format (*.rtf)
• HTML (*.htm & *.html)
• Adobe Acrobat files (*.pdf)
• Text files (*.txt)
• Comma-separated files (*.csv)
• Data Interchange Format (*.dif)
• Symbolic Link (*.slk)
• LaTeX (*.tex)
• XML (*.xml)
• dBase (*.dbf)
• SQL scripts (*.sql)
• Clipboard
• OpenDocument Spreadsheet (*.ods)
• OpenDocument Text (*.odt)

For data warehousing projects, the best format is (in most cases) the comma separated file (CSV). Therefore, select the CSV option and hit Next to continue.

Select Fields to Export and set Order of Exported Fields

The next dialog allows you to define only a subset of fields for each table. The recommendation for this dialog is to activate the Export all fields of all tables option for data warehouse projects:

Select the Next button to continue.

Set Export Options for the Selected Objects

In this dialog, you can define export options for the selected tables:

Make sure to activate the Quote Strings option and do not define any headers and footers. Select the Next button to continue.

Set Base Formats of Data Types

In the next dialog, you can define the base formats for common datatypes, such as date and timestamps:

You should keep the default settings and hit the Next button to continue.

Set Export Final Options

In this dialog, you can add some more options, for example how many records you want to export:

Select the Next button to continue to the next dialog.

Export Progress

After hitting the Export button in the next dialog, the following dialog shows you the progress of the database export:

If you want to schedule the export, use the Tools / Save Template menu item (next to the help button on the bottom left of the last screen) to save the settings. You can use the command line tool for scheduling the export using the Windows Scheduler.

For buying this tool, check out the EMS web site for the product. You should also check out EMS SQL Management Studio for InterBase/Firebird if you’re frequently working with InterBase or Firebird databases, for example for developing or other tasks, such as importing data or documenting databases.

Also, you might have noticed that the screen shots have been taken unter Linux (Gnome in this case). As a Windows application, the vendor is not officially supporting it with CrossOver Linux, but experiences have been very positive so far (matter of fact: no errors experienced).

If you like this how to document or have an idea for improvement, please leave a comment below.